Friday, April 13, 2007

Cat blogging

Can't really post now

I need Bloglines to access sites and news sources and it is totally fucked. Well, maybe not totally, but enough for me. Meanwhile, I'll continue with my intemperate posting with this offering.

Is there one single movie that ever filmed a traffic shot in any country that didn't include a shot of a VW Bug? I think not.

My apologies, but once something like this is pointed out to you its impossible to ignore. You will always notice this. I am completely soulless and deserve your wrath. The good part is you won't be distracted for very long. The V-dubs are in short shots.

Now to really annoy you. Often the VW will appear over and over. If its yellow in the first scene. Additional scenes will also include a yellow VW. And again.

BTW, I've owned Beetles, but never a '55. That would have been kewl. If you look carefully, you can see this Beetle has a split rear window. I always liked those.

UPDATE: Why does the hero always drive an early Ford Mustang. 1964 1/2 up to 1968. Hollywood has no imagination or they have a thing for Mustangs?

Is there really a tipping point?

The theory seems to make sense, but then we get to the Bush Administration. Are there enough fucking scandals, mistakes, incompetencies, illegal activities, crony isms, deaths, lies to create a tipping point? It doesn't look like it.

Compare Bush to your partner. How many such things would you accept before kicking their ass out? Yeah, I figure about two max. So why does the American public keep taking it up the ass? Have they become masochists?

Democracy

Don' ask...Don't tell

Lawyers should never ask a southern grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer.

In a trial, a southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know me?"

She responded, "Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a young boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you never will amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you."

The lawyer was stunned! Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?"

She again replied, "Why, yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a youngster, too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him."

The defense attorney almost died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said, "If either of you bastards ask her if she knows me, I'll send your ass to the electric chair."

Judge Rejects Padilla Torture Argument

Will this poor man ever get justice? Under Bush? Stupid question.

A federal judge rejected a motion by alleged al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla to dismiss terrorism charges against him over claims he was tortured in U.S. military custody. The ruling removes one of the last major obstacles to the start of Padilla's trial next week.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke stressed in a 12-page order filed late Monday that she was not passing judgment on the torture allegations. Rather, she said the effort to dismiss the case for "outrageous government conduct" was faulty on legal grounds.

Padilla's lawyers claim that during the 3 1/2 years Padilla was held as an "enemy combatant" at a Navy brig he was routinely subjected to harsh treatment and torture.

He claimed that he was forced to stand in painful stress positions, given LSD or some other drug as a "truth serum," subjected to loud noises and noxious odors, and forced to endure sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold and harsh lights.

The Pentagon and Justice Department have repeatedly denied those claims. Officials with the brig in Charleston, S.C., said during earlier testimony before Cooke that Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen and Muslim convert, was not mistreated, though they acknowledged occasional removal of the mattress in his cell and of his copy of the Quran.

No nuclear weapons under Iran’s defence doctrine – Larijani

I'm gonna say this one more time. Not that its gonna make any difference, but I'll feel better.

Iran’s defence doctrine does not provide for the creation of nuclear weapons, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said on Monday.

“If they [the West] continue to pressure Iran over its peaceful nuclear activities we have no other choice but to follow parliament's order and review our membership of the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty],” Larijani said.

Asked if Tehran may change the direction of its nuclear programme if Iran’s opponents persist, Larijani said his country will continue its civilian nuclear programme because the creation of nuclear weapons is not allowed by in the national defence doctrine.

However he warned that if the West continues the same policy, this would harm the NPT.

Per the NPT:

"Non-nuclear-weapon States Parties undertake not to acquire or produce nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices."

Iran claims they are adhering to the NPT so they have every right to produce, even on an industrial scale, peaceful nuclear materials.

Will Iran eventually produce nuclear weapons? Most likely. Sooner or later the Swiss will have them.

Cuba, Israel, India, and Pakistan were the only states that were not members of the NPT.

With decent diplomacy, its possible these countries could have been brought around, but now only Cuba, among this group, has no nuclear weapons. We're moving into a nuclear age and there isn't much anyone can do to stop it. For that we can be eternally, possibly literally, grateful to the idiot-in-chief.

Sneh: Cluster bomb use was a mistake

It sure as hell was a mistake and was inexcusable.

Israel made a mistake when it used cluster bombs during the Second Lebanon War, deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh told the BBC in a documentary on last summer's war in Lebanon set to be broadcast on the Radio 4 network in the United Kingdom on Tuesday and internationally on the BBC world service and Web site later this week.

Sneh became the first Israeli government representative to apologize for using cluster bombs, according to a transcript of the documentary obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post.

"It was a mistake, it was a mistake," Sneh told interviewers Edward Stourton and Mark Savage. When they asked whether he regretted the use of cluster bombs because of the damage to Israel's image or because they "kill a lot of people," Sneh responded: "No, people are still losing their lives from time to time and we don't like it. But it was... it was a mistake."

Those seem like some pretty clear quotations, don't ya think? And he is quoted as using the word "mistake" three times.

But, of course he didn't say that at all, right?

When asked about the transcript, Sneh said he "was misunderstood by the reporters." He said he could not comment further because the use of cluster bombs was still being investigated by the IDF. But his spokesman said Sneh did not think the use of cluster bombs during the war was a mistake.

"He thinks they were used in specific instances when it was necessary," the spokesman said.

Of course they did lie about using cluster bombs at all.

Israel initially denied using cluster bombs during the war, but later confirmed the findings of a US State Department investigation submitted to Congress on January 29 that alleged that they were used.

I'm gonna tie Bush to this. His actions since in office have made lying perfectly acceptable. I'm not just talking normal political spin here, but out and out lying right to the publics' faces.

McCain Says he Would Have Gone Into Baghdad Market Without Escort

Go back John. Prove it.

Sen. John McCain said Monday he would have taken his tour of an Iraqi market last week even if he hadn’t been accompanied by heavily armed U.S. soldiers.

The Republican presidential hopeful said he would have walked through the Bab al-Sharqi market in Baghdad without the military protection, but the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, had recommended the armed escort.

“I’m not notorious for being nervous about going anywhere,” said McCain, R-Ariz. “I’ll gladly go almost anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, but I did respond and do what General Petraeus asked me to do.”

Must read IMHO

The drafting of reports by the world’s pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For many months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel’s reports are extremely conservative – even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything which threatens their interests.

BTW, someone convinced me to quit using the term global warming. It feeds into the Neanderthal brains who point out cold snaps to make the point the globe is not actually warming. Climate change is a little harder for them to refute.

The 15 captured Brits

The more information coming out it becomes much more bizarre. Its boiling down to "he said, she said" and we'll probably never know the truth. But that won't stop me from Frisking this thing.

The only woman among the 15 British naval personnel held by Iran told Monday how she was forced to strip and her captors had threatened that she might never see her baby daughter again.

I'm not privy to this sort of thing, but aren't even prison inmates made to strip and change into prison clothing? See later because she wasn't totally nude.

But in a new round of the propaganda war between the two sides, fought over the captives, Iran broadcast new footage of the Britons playing table-tennis and watching an English football game which it insisted showed they were well treated.

Well, that sure sounds like torture.

"At one stage ... (the interrogator) asked me, 'How do you feel about dying for your country?" she said.

That is, at best a veiled threat to her life. It also might easily be a question an Iranian is curious to know the answer to although her being in the military should make the question rather moot.

"The next day, another interrogator said to me, 'You don't understand, you must cooperate with us. Do you not want to see your daughter again?"

This is the most serious accusation. They were captured military. Yes, it was possible she would never see her family again.

For the first five days, Turney was also made to believe that the other 14 men had gone home, and she was the only one left.

That's pretty lame psychological warfare if you ask me.

"I was thrown into a tiny little cell and ordered to strip off," Turney told the newspaper.

"They took everything from me apart from my knickers. Then some cotton pyjamas were thrown in for me to wear and four filthy blankets. The metal door slammed shut again."

I have to withhold judgment on this because she makes no mention of what sex the guards were and it might have been females. We just don't know. At any rate this isn't terribly humiliating to my way of looking at it, but then I've seen women's breasts. Big deal.

The youngest of the captives, Arthur Batchelor, 20, said he was also stripped to his underpants, left in solitary confinement for several days ordeal, and an interrogator indicated that if he did not co-operate, he would not see his family.

Following their capture on March 23, Batchelor said: "I was frozen in terror and just stared into the darkness of my blindfold. I could feel the emotion welling up inside me."

Again, we have Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as benchmarks. This is pretty tame stuff although I'm sure he was extremely frightened.

He added that he been berated for his youth and diminutive appearance -- his captors called him "Mr Bean," after the bumbling television character -- and one of his interrogators "indicated I might never see my family again if I didn't go along with what they told me to do."

OMG! They called him Mr Bean. The fucking bastards.

To be honest, with the uncertainty and the picture of Iran painted in the West, I have no idea whether I'd be any braver or less terrorized than these 15. I like to hope I'd have handled it well, but just as happy I'll never know.

Saving Bush from himself

Playing a little catch-up here.

And finally, during a photo-op at the White House last week, the president nearly caused a serious accident by attempting to plug an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of a hybrid car. “I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally said. “I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

If its possible for an idiot president or your average, non-technically inclined person to plug a live electrical chord into the hydrogen fuel cells rather than the storage batteries of a hybrid car, that is flat out bad design. Take it back to engineering, Ford.

About Me

Spent many years programming, mostly mainframes. Been in business for myself, sky dived, scuba dived, practiced karate (until the broken ribs & finger), driven a sprint car (unreal). Want the US to be great again and worry it's impossible. I consider myself a moderate because I believe most Americans don't approve of torture, do want everyone to have health care, a pension and/or a job, privacy, freedom and NO WAR. Not too radical. I use profanity like a sailor so you should leave if you are sensitive.

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